Chloe Leung

Price wars have prompted many providers to lower fees

Accusations by the US House Select Committee that BlackRock was profiting from investments that help the Chinese military were followed by significant outflows in four of the named funds, Morningstar data for August shows. Four out of the five BlackRock funds highlighted by the committee experienced outflows in August, with three of them witnessing a significant drop in net flows, according to Morningstar data. The $21.6bn iShares MSCI Emerging Markets exchange traded fund saw the largest outf…

Asset managers have been dropping the word “sustainable” from the names of funds in response to increasing regulatory and reputational concerns. Forty-four sustainable funds removed the label from their brand name during the first half of 2023, in contrast to 2022, when 99 funds added “sustainable” to their name, according to data from consultancy Broadridge. Industry participants have blamed the lack of specific methodology for the calculation of sustainable investments under the Sustainable…

HSBC Asset Management has enjoyed larger growth in market share of passively managed fund assets in Europe than any other manager as it taps into a “foundational” shift in investor behaviour. HSBC AM’s share of passive assets has grown from 18 per cent in June 2014 to 44 per cent in June 2020 and 63 per cent in June 2023. In the past three years the manager’s actively managed assets have shrunk from €43.5bn to €39.4bn in June 2023, while its passive assets under management jumped from €39.8bn…

A clarification provided by Brussels on the application of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation has not led to the wave of fund upgrades many expected. More than 300 funds were downgraded from “dark green” Article 9 — which must explicitly follow a sustainable investing strategy — to Article 8 in the final quarter of last year. The downgrades to Article 8 — which must promote sustainable or environmental characteristics but do not have sustainable investing as a core objective — was m…

The EU has been urged to set “precise” guidelines for funds to determine whether an investment is sustainable after an unprecedented number of products upgraded the proportion of sustainable investments they hold. According to Morningstar, 294 Article 8 funds revised their commitment between July and September, a rise from 190 in the previous quarter. Under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, Article 8 funds must promote environmental or social characteristics but do not have s…

Double-digit growth in exchange traded fund assets across many Asia-Pacific markets last year helped a handful of local fund firms strengthen their position as market leaders. Taiwan, South Korea and China stood out as the fastest-growing ETF markets in the Asia-Pacific region during the first nine months of 2023, with ETF asset growth rates of between 26 per cent and 31 per cent, Broadridge data shows. This helped the region outpace global growth in ETF assets under management, surpassing Eur…

Reducing fees on exchange traded funds does not significantly increase the chances of attracting investors, new research suggests, denting the hopes of asset managers that have engaged in price wars in the sector. ETF providers have frequently cut the charges on European products to get an edge over rival firms as competition has heated up in recent years. Nearly 940 European ETFs cut their annual fees over the five years to the end of 2022, Morningstar data shows. However, on average just ov…

Inflows have remained modest for most managers even though there have been many more launches